Seven Days Before the Mafia Princess Died novel · Chapter 21 of 24
Chapter 21: Landi
"I'm not here to move in," Bianca said.
She stood on the porch step with the suitcase between her feet, and the porch light made her look like a photograph of herself.
Behind me Carlo had gone very quiet, and Ciro's hand had found the small of my back.
"Then why the bag?" I said.
"Because I'm going to Buffalo."
Ciro's head turned.
"Sunday," she said to him. "With you, if you'll take me. I want to see where the fire was." She lifted her chin. "And I want to meet whoever's left."
"Bianca," he said.
"I don't remember you." She said it without cruelty. "But I remember a lullaby. A woman singing it, in a room with a window. I hummed it on the dock and didn't know where from."
His eyes were bright.
"It's Mamma's," he said. "She sang it to me, and then to you."
"Then I'd like to learn the words."
The three of us stood there, none of us knowing what to do with our hands.
"I'm taking the Landi name," Bianca said. "I've told the Commission. I'll sign the papers Monday."
"You don't have to do it for me," I said.
"I'm not doing it for you." A thin smile. "I'm doing it because I'm the only one in that house who was never a Barsanti."
She looked down at her feet.
"I came to ask if I can come back, afterward. For your scans. For the days after the chair." She swallowed. "Not to live here. Just to sit with you."
I looked at her for a long time.
"Wait there," I said.
I went inside.
In the bottom drawer of the dresser, under my winter sweaters, there was a flat tin box I had kept since I was ten.
It held a wooden bird the size of my thumb, carved badly, with one wing longer than the other.
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